Obama Derangement Syndrome

We all know by now that everything with Trump and MAGA folks in general is projection (remember my song about projection from early 2017?), but I had a realization of a new example recently. It seems totally obvious, and maybe I've heard or read someone else saying this, but I don't remember that being the case.

We hear interminably about Trump Derangement Syndrome. It has been a fairly effective tool of the Right to attack those of us who assail his many faults and unhinged policies. But pointing those things out is not deranged: it's based on facts, no more so than now, when he's spent the past seven months setting the country back decades in health, science, education and more, and creating the infrastructure for a fascist dictatorship.

The people who had actual derangement syndrome, based solely on the person in leadership, were the Right — over Barack Obama. Obama Derangement Syndrome, if you will. They thought he would do all the things Trump is actually doing (detainment camps, Jade Helm, weaponizing the DOJ against his enemies). But he did none of that, of course. 

What he really did was wear a tan suit. He pointed out the fact that a white cop stopped a Black professor from entering his own home. He said Trayvon Martin could have been his son.

And yet to this day they equate their "trauma" from living through the Obama presidency to what we are all enduring now (and between 2017–2020) under Trump.

Many people have said what this BlueSky poster said today:

Conservatives went insane because there was a black president.

Back in mid-November 2008, just after the election, I wrote about the racist response to Obama becoming President. Then the next eight years happened and it induced naive complacency in me, despite the way coverage was skewed against Obama and his tan suit. Objectively, how much better could he have handled it?

But you can't underestimate the confluence of American racism with the interests of the .01 percent. The manipulation of Christianity, starting in the 1970s but accelerating since then, and the rise of the Federalist Society, work to keep us all where the richest of the rich want us. 

Now we know that means killing huge numbers of people along the way and ultimately destroying our human habitat.

Who's deranged? The people who think the apocalypse is coming, and that it's a good thing, that's who.